tl;dr game is not bad, but the game is not great. in it's current state it's worth ~$10-15, with some of the best art direction i've ever seen in a game. 70% of the gameplay is tedious and annoying and obvious on how to minmax to progress, 30% of the gameplay is great.

-right out of the gate, you notice some questionable design choices, and they don't stop coming. many of them lead me to believe they launched out of desperation and kept some systems they knew were bad, but wanted to give the illusion of listening to feedback and forcing people to engage with the game more in its early access state. i don't think they know what they want the game to look like ultimately. it should have either been a story game, or a roguelike arpg grind game with more obviously tunable systems to tweak and keep the scaling going. they mixed the two and do neither well. they probably started development doing the former, and the design remnants of that hold it back.

-the fastest way to move around the map is to kill yourself to go back to whispers (spawn points) there is really no point in wasting time running back through an area you have already cleared.
-map traversal is annoying and tedious
-inventory management is genuinely one of the worst things i have ever seen.
-some map design is good, much of it is unnecessary
-looting and resource collection is tedious until you get better resource collecting items
-durability makes very little sense
-ichor upgrades are an embarrassing excuse of a system given the choices you have, the fact that you're tempted to even put points into carrying more items of a specific type is a testament to how bad the inventory management is. strictly the best option is to pick rings because they always give you stats with no additional work from the player, and then primary/offhand slots.
-perf is pretty bad even on an amazing system, it's at its worst when it's raining, no idea why you can't turn off your pretty rain graphics or have an option to do so.
-there are two menus that are are the same, the quick menu, and the menu, the quick menu shows an exit to lobby (exit game) option, the menu does not. why?
-item drop ratios for crafting are bad, made even worse by the bad inventory management
-focus is completely overtuned, you can buy as many focus potions as you want, but you are capped on other items you can buy.
-many mechanics are not explained or made obvious to the player
-equip-able items requiring attributes that drop feel bad because you've already committed to certain attributes, you will not be able to use it on your character, so 33-66% of the main/off hand items no matter how cool/good are just trash


there's some good here, but it's mostly carried by the art department, textures are hand painted, good voice acting, the story is engaging, the lighting is beautiful, the sound design is fantastic.

a lot of my complaints are fixable, the reason i'm being harsh is that there were several small changes they could have tweaked to make the game palatable, and it would be a drop in the bucket compared to ALL the work done for the rest of the game.

tl;dr game is not bad, but the game is not great. in it's current state it's worth ~$10-15, with some of the best art direction i've ever seen in a game. 70% of the gameplay is tedious and annoying and obvious on how to minmax to progress, 30% of the gameplay is great. -right out of the gate, you notice some questionable design choices, and they don't stop coming. many of them lead me to believe they launched out of desperation and kept some systems they knew were bad, but wanted to give the illusion of listening to feedback and forcing people to engage with the game more in its early access state. i don't think they know what they want the game to look like ultimately. it should have either been a story game, or a roguelike arpg grind game with more obviously tunable systems to tweak and keep the scaling going. they mixed the two and do neither well. they probably started development doing the former, and the design remnants of that hold it back. -the fastest way to move around the map is to kill yourself to go back to whispers (spawn points) there is really no point in wasting time running back through an area you have already cleared. -map traversal is annoying and tedious -inventory management is genuinely one of the worst things i have ever seen. -some map design is good, much of it is unnecessary -looting and resource collection is tedious until you get better resource collecting items -durability makes very little sense -ichor upgrades are an embarrassing excuse of a system given the choices you have, the fact that you're tempted to even put points into carrying more items of a specific type is a testament to how bad the inventory management is. strictly the best option is to pick rings because they always give you stats with no additional work from the player, and then primary/offhand slots. -perf is pretty bad even on an amazing system, it's at its worst when it's raining, no idea why you can't turn off your pretty rain graphics or have an option to do so. -there are two menus that are are the same, the quick menu, and the menu, the quick menu shows an exit to lobby (exit game) option, the menu does not. why? -item drop ratios for crafting are bad, made even worse by the bad inventory management -focus is completely overtuned, you can buy as many focus potions as you want, but you are capped on other items you can buy. -many mechanics are not explained or made obvious to the player -equip-able items requiring attributes that drop feel bad because you've already committed to certain attributes, you will not be able to use it on your character, so 33-66% of the main/off hand items no matter how cool/good are just trash there's some good here, but it's mostly carried by the art department, textures are hand painted, good voice acting, the story is engaging, the lighting is beautiful, the sound design is fantastic. a lot of my complaints are fixable, the reason i'm being harsh is that there were several small changes they could have tweaked to make the game palatable, and it would be a drop in the bucket compared to ALL the work done for the rest of the game.